Why You Should Use and SEO Company
In Meredith Kim’s post Building
Effective Web Landing Pages she explains why a landing page is effective
and discusses strategies to ensure that it reaches its intended audience. While Scott (2015, pg. 406) summarizes that “the
best search engine marketing comes from paying attention to and understanding
our buyers, not manipulating or tricking them,” I do not believe that utilizing
SEO companies and their suggestions is ineffective or manipulative.
Scott (2015, pg. 296) defines search engine optimization as the “art
and science of ensuring that words and phrases on your site, blog, and other
online content are found by the search engines and that, once found, your site
is given highest ranking possible in the natural search.” The point of an SEO company is to make sure
that a company is properly utilizing these words and phrases to capitalize
revenue.
Take Meredith Kim’s example of the professional builder, small business
owner. In this example, the consumer “stumbled
upon” their blog. What made them stumble
upon their blog? What did they search
that led them to the blog? Was it on
page 1 or page 101 of Google? Had she
been researching for weeks prior to finding the blog and ultimately finding the
landing page? Would she have reached the
blog sooner if the business owner was utilizing an SEO company? While a small business owner can optimize
their landing page the best they know how and by using Google
recommendations, they are most likely missing key phrases or things that
will catch the consumer’s attention and they may not have time to regularly
update and refresh the site.
This is one of the top three reasons for utilizing an SEO company;
saving time and money, experience and understanding, and optimum results (Edge,
2016). The professional SEO company
can dedicate the time to ensuring the small business owner’s landing page is
up-to-date and content is relevant and continuously refreshed. This gives the business owner time to focus
on their business and ultimately, they benefit from the SEO company’s expertise
gaining more exposure and revenue for the company.
Think of all the ways the above-mentioned business owner could optimize
their site. What if the business owner
missed one, what if they forgot about it or got busy and didn’t update it for
months? How would he know what key words
and phrases were performing well and which ones were not? They wouldn’t see the same return doing it on
their own rather than if they had hired a professional company. The below is a screen shot of all of the ways
a consumer could look for hotels in Lake George, NY, what the most popular key
phrases are (along with statistics), and recommendations for what phrases to
change to be more reachable to consumers.
This is incredibly helpful!
This doesn’t make the company “manipulative” it makes them strategic
and effective business owners. However,
to Scott’s point, there are going to be SEO companies out there that take
advantage and in fact are manipulative and the business owner should avoid
working with these companies. This is
why Lachance (2016)
recommends asking the following 10 questions when selecting an SEO provider;
1. May I have a list of current and past clients?
2. How will you improve my search engine rankings?
3. Do you adhere to search engines' webmaster guidelines?
4. Can you guarantee my website will achieve a number-one ranking on
Google, Bing and Yahoo?
5. Are you experienced at improving local search results?
6. Will you share with me all changes you make to my site?
7. How do you measure the success of your SEO campaigns?
8. How will we communicate and how often?
9. What are your fees and payment terms?
10. What happens when we part ways?
Sources
Edge, Amelia. (2016, Apr.
4). Top 3 Benefits of Hiring a Reputable
SEO Company. The Chicago Tribune. Retrieved:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/oak-park/community/chi-ugc-article-top-3-benefits-of-hiring-a-reputable-seo-comp-2016-04-14-story.html
Scott, David. (2015). The New Rules of Marketing & PR. John Whiley & Sons, Inc.: Hoboken, NJ.
Lachance-Schandrow, Kim. (2016). 10 Questions to Ask When Hiring an SEO
Consultant. Entrepreneur. Retrieved: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/227229
Todd, Caitlyn. (2017, Feb.
28). Courtyard Lake George Quarterly Key Word
Refresh: Q4. W-Promote.
